


Asylum

by HenryMercury



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s03e20 Echo House, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-25
Updated: 2014-02-25
Packaged: 2018-01-13 18:18:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1236373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HenryMercury/pseuds/HenryMercury
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He walks out of Eichen House the way he walks through the halls of the police station—purposeful stride, stiff swings of the arms, chin held level, eyes ahead. He doesn’t pause, because if he pauses then he’ll stop walking, and if he stops walking he’ll never be able to start again. He imagines that he’s on the job, moving towards someone in need of help, instead of away.</p>
<p>Away from his <i>son<i></i></i> in need of help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Asylum

He walks out of Eichen House the way he walks through the halls of the police station—purposeful stride, stiff swings of the arms, chin held level, eyes ahead. He doesn’t pause, because if he pauses then he’ll stop walking, and if he stops walking he’ll never be able to start again. He imagines that he’s on the job, moving towards someone in need of help, instead of away.

Away from his _son_ in need of help.

He makes it as far as the car before the ground seems to undulate beneath him. He grasps the car door and breathes, in and out the way he’s always coached Stiles to do when he’s stressed out. Tries desperately not to imagine Stiles having a panic attack while he’s locked behind those sharp black gates, where none of his friends or family can reach him.

He doesn’t even have his pillow to hold on to.

His _pillow—_

He’s been the Sheriff of Beacon Hills for years, and, especially during the last few, he’s seen things that aren’t for the faint-hearted. The bodies, mauled and crushed and killed in just about every way possible—ritual sacrifices? Seriously?—have struck their fair share of fear into his heart, but this... this is a kind of fear that’s been struck into him by only one incident in his life so far.

He clambers into the driver’s seat, stabs the key around in the vicinity of the ignition until his trembling hand gets lucky and it slides in. Again, he tries to imagine he’s working, going through a routine of swift, confident, _imperative_ movements.

He’s not driving towards a crime scene, though. He’s not driving _towards_ anything at all. His son is in prison, trapped in every kind of cage, even the doors of his own mind swinging shut against him. Since Claudia’s death, their family has been small but intense. Both of them have so much love to give and since they’re all each other has, they each get the full brunt of it. He worries about Stiles all day long; Stiles feeds him ridiculous salads and shouts when he exercises his right as a consenting adult to say yes to curly fries every once in a while. It’s incessant and annoying and comforting and necessary in the way it fills up all the silence that would otherwise gape around them. Stiles is a fairly small boy but he’s also a huge person, complicated and motivated and endlessly caring. He’d drifted for a while, but now he understands _why_ , he thought he might be able to have his son back.

Now he’s supposed to come to terms with the possibility of losing him for good?

No. That’s not something that’s ever going to happen. It’s just not acceptable.

His fingers are still clenched around the car key, pressing in that way that lacks the tension to do any real good—like when you’re laughing and your limbs seem to vibrate with it until trying to push at something just bounces the force back into yourself. It’s much better when it comes from laughing, this feeling. He brings his other hand up to help and turns the key with a shove.

The engine chuckles to life and suddenly he’s actually doing this, actually driving off and leaving Stiles behind in this place. He debates marching right back inside and confiscating the paperwork, dragging his son back out and back home where he belongs—only it won’t solve the bigger problems here. Stiles is only in Eichen House for seventy-two hours. There are things threatening him that the Sheriff has no power to arrest, places no father can bring his son home from.

His life’s work has been devoted to helping people, saving lives wherever he can, but in the end he’s always failed at protecting the ones that matter the most, the people closest to him. It’s his job to be strong, and yet without Stiles he’d never have made it out of the seemingly unending tunnel of depression that had yawned open in front of him in Claudia’s absence. Stiles has saved him, and now he can’t save him back, and there’s just no foreseeable way for him to keep going if this all turns out for the worst.

He couldn’t even remember to bring Stiles’ _pillow_.

He lays his hands on the steering wheel, more firmly now. He knows what he needs to do now—the only thing he _can_ do. Presses his foot to the accelerator. He’s going to get that damn pillow.

 

Stiles’ bedroom is dark and empty, and while that doesn’t come as a surprise it still hurts. Stiles is passing yet another sleepless night in a place filled with the wrong people, and the Sheriff will have to pass his own in a place that’s empty of the right ones. He grabs the pillow, stuffs the soft mass of it under his arm and marches it out to the car.

He’s halfway back to Eichen when he realises that this isn’t really the right thing to do. Stiles is an adult now, for all intents and purposes. It begrudges a father to admit it, but when a kid’s seen the things he knows Stiles has seen, done what he’s done, taken responsibility for everything that he has, it’s only fair to respect his wishes. It’s the whole reason he’s shut away in the first place. This isn’t a sleepover at Scott’s, or school camp, or camping of any kind. He can’t show up with the pillow. Stiles doesn’t want it.

He doesn’t stop the car, because if he stops it he’ll never be able to make himself start it again, never be able to muster the willpower to choose a destination worthy of that effort. He just keeps driving around aimlessly until he finds himself in a very familiar street.

 

Melissa answers the door in her pyjamas, but she doesn’t look like she’s been sleeping. He can hear the TV on in the background, so he figures she’s been up.

He apologises all the same, perhaps for potentially waking her, perhaps for something else, he doesn’t even really know. It’s so hard to find the words for anything right now.

He stumbles slightly on the front step. Melissa catches his arm with a steady hand and doesn’t let go.

“Thanks,” he mumbles. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologise,” she says, in that soft, easy tone of hers. She’s been through a lot as well, but she always seems so solid in spite of it. He’s seen her fall apart more than a few times, certainly, but her resilience is something he can only wish he had. Her smile is still kind and open and hopeful, whereas his has withered—a smile that says, ‘This is good, but...’

He can’t think of anything else to say, so he just goes with her as she leads him into the living room. The show that’s on is some late night rerun of a decades-old soap, but right now he’s just infinitely thankful that it isn’t a horror movie, or a hospital drama, or anything along those lines. Anything that reminds him of what his life is right now.

“Scott’s out with some of the others from the pack,” Melissa tells him. He’s not sure whether she’s explaining this for a specific reason, or just chatting to keep his mind focused on something, keep him with her. “I’d tell you what he’s doing, but it’s probably not something I should let slip to the town’s Sheriff. Probably best you never hear about it,” she winks. “I was actually going to make some tea. I’ll make you some too. Are you hungry?”

He shakes his head.

“Thanks,” he repeats.

The kitchen isn’t far from where he’s sitting, and all the sounds Melissa makes as she puts the jug on to boil and fishes through the cupboards for mugs and teabags are audible over the noise of the television. He lets them flow into him, uses them to picture her moving around the small workspace in that decisive, competent way she does.

She returns minutes later with two steaming green teas, sets them both down on the coffee table in front of the couch and joins him. She seats herself close to him; not uncomfortably so, but enough that his shoulder and hip are pressed against her, a reassuring touch so he can’t forget she’s right here with him. She sits with her legs folded underneath her, leans her head against his shoulder.

“Are our lives ever going to get any simpler?” she wonders aloud.

They watch the screen in silence for several minutes. Without context, it’s hard to tell what’s happening, but he’s not sure he’d have the wherewithal to follow the drama even if he’d started at the beginning.

“I forgot to bring his pillow,” he confesses quietly. Adds, “It’s out in the car right now.”

Melissa places a hand on his knee. He knows she doesn’t need him to go into any more detail, because she understands the workings of his family as well as he does, and as well as he understands the workings of hers. She knows where Stiles is right now because he couldn’t let this happen without talking to somebody, and she was both the most qualified and the most sympathetic listening ear he could’ve hoped to find. She knows that Stiles can’t sleep without his pillow, because Stiles has spent almost as many nights in this house as he has his own, just as the Stilinski house has always been Scott’s second home.

They’ve done most of it together; lost people, picked themselves back up, raised sons, seen those sons grow up and grow distant—and then they’d become involved in a whole lot of supernatural confusion that’s nearly made the rest of it seem like a walk in the park.

He rests his own hand over Melissa’s.

“I don’t know if Scott told you, but he and the others are looking for a cure,” Melissa says. “If there’s something, anything that can be done, they’ll do it. We’ll all do everything we can. The game’s different now—and sure, that’s meant a lot of insane drama and life-threatening situations so far, but maybe having the supernatural on our side will help us win this one.”

He knows he wouldn’t believe that kind of reassurance coming from any other mouth, but Melissa has wiped his tears and listened to him at his most incoherent, put him to bed when he was too drunk and ashamed to go home to Stiles—even though, after everything that happened with Scott’s father, he should have been too ashamed to show up drunk on _her_ doorstep as well. Melissa saves people for a living at the hospital, and she’s been saving him all this time too.  

“I just want him back, you know? You’ve seen that place, haven’t you? It’s even worse on the inside...” he trails off into her hair, presses his face there and tries unsuccessfully to keep back the tears.

“We’ll get him back,” Melissa soothes, lifting her head up to look him in the face. “Don’t you worry, we’ll get him back.”

He leans forward, presses a kiss against her forehead. He’s too much of a mess to kiss her properly right now, and either too busy or too much of a coward to do it the rest of the time, but maybe someday soon he’ll catch the right moment. It seems silly to be so tentative when he already knows they’re on the same page, already knows that they work well together, navigating all of each other’s bumps and bruises through years of experience. Neither one of them ever tried to be a replacement for the person who left the hollow space beside the other, they just met in the middle and became mutually indispensible.

Someday soon he’ll kiss Melissa like he means to, sometime when Stiles isn’t locked up in a mental institution and Scott isn’t out doing something dangerous and, from the sound of it, less than law-abiding. For now, though, they just lean in and take each other’s weight the way they’ve always done, and he lets his eyes fall shut because he’s exhausted and because, against all the odds, there _is_ somewhere left that he feels safe.


End file.
